I thank the Subbu Forum and the IIC for doing me the honour of asking
me to deliver the first memorial lecture in memory of the late K.
Subrahmanyam, (KS), a towering figure, a teacher to many of us, and
someone who was central to debates on India's national security for over
half a century.

This lecture is also a responsibility because of the very high standards
of intellectual rigour and analysis that KS set in his lectures and
writings. Many of you present here knew KS well. His intellectual
sharpness was awe inspiring until you understood that it was an
expression of his dedication to his craft and to the power of reason,
and hid a sensitive appreciation of others beneath that forbidding
exterior. Today every think tank in India which concerns itself with
strategic affairs has people who worked with KS and whom he mentored. He
combined those qualities of mind with personal courage, which became
evident when he was on an Indian Airlines aircraft which was hijacked.

But I am not here to recount KS' life or his intellectual struggles with
orthodoxy and political correctness in matters of national security.
Instead I would like to consider what K Subrahmanyam stood for in his
professional life and the areas where he enriched our strategic culture.
Let us first look at Indian strategic culture itself. Thereafter we
might look at how KS changed the way that we in India look at some major
security issues. And finally I will speculate on what would concern KS
if he were looking at the world today.
1. India's Strategic Culture

We often hear statements alleging that India lacks a strategic culture.
Sadly this is more often heard from Indians than foreigners. One
sometimes wonders whether the idea that India lacks a strategic culture
was not useful in the past to those who did not wish to see India's
weight translate into the effective exercise of power on the
international stage. While one can understand foreigners spreading this
idea, it is incomprehensible to me that some Indians should also believe
this and still propagate this idea.
The most cogent expression of this idea was by George Tanham, a senior
defence analyst at Rand Corporation in the early nineties Frankly
speaking, for a civilisation and state like India not to have a
strategic culture is impossible. It is like someone claiming to be
apolitical, which itself is a political choice. Many others see in India
a strategic culture that is "more distinct and coherent than that of
most contemporary nation states", according to Rodney W. Jones.
What is strategic culture and how can foreigners and Indians draw such
diametrically opposite conclusions about India's strategic culture? As I
have said before, the most comprehensive (but incomprehensible)
definition I have seen is that: strategic culture is that set of shared
beliefs, assumptions and modes of behaviour, derived from common
experience and accepted narratives (both oral and written) that shape
collective identity and relationships to other groups, and which
determine appropriate ends and means for achieving security objectives.
Or, to put it more intelligibly without the academic jargon, strategic
culture is an identifiable set of basic assumptions about the nature of
international and military issues. This would involve both a central
strategic paradigm (about the role of war in human affairs, the efficacy
of force, the nature of the adversary, and so on), and a grand strategy
or secondary assumptions about operational policy that flow from the
assumptions.

By this definition of course we in India have a strategic culture. It is
an indigenous construct over millennia, modified considerably by our
experience in the last two centuries. For instance, war and peace are
continuing themes in Indian strategic culture. While not celebrating war
the culture treats it as acceptable when good fights evil. Indian
strategic culture has been comfortable with this contradiction. Both
major Indian epics deal with wars, and treat rivalries as natural and
normal. Kautilya addressed the use of force in detail. While Gandhiji
shunned the use of force and opposed violence in politics he was
politically steely and unyielding, and accepted appropriate violence as
unavoidable in certain circumstances. As a result of this acceptance of
contradictions, Indian strategic culture supports ethical views that
dovetail easily with international norms of conduct whether legal or on
human rights, so long as they respect India's status. The traditional
culture also has a strong pedagogical bias which is reflected in the way
India chooses to negotiate, and in the attendant risk that any external
compromise is seen domestically as surrender.

One of the best descriptions of India's contemporary strategic culture
is by Kanti Bajpai who pointed out differences between 'Nehruvians',
neo-liberals and hyper-realists, stressed what is common to all three
streams of Indian strategic thought, and described how they might differ
on the best means but not on India's external goals. To summarise
Bajpai, all three streams agree on the centrality of the sovereign state
in international relations and recognise no higher authority; see
interests, power and violence as the staples of international relations
that states cannot ignore; and think that power comprises both military
and economic capabilities at a minimum. Beyond this they differ on the
best strategy and means to be adopted.
For 'Nehruvians' the natural state of anarchy can be mitigated by
understandings between states, and to make preparations for war and a
balance of power central to security and foreign policy is both ruinous
and futile. For neoliberals mutual gain is a conditioning factor for the
natural state of anarchy between states, particularly as they become
interdependent. They therefore see economic power as a vital goal for
states, to be achieved by free markets at home and free trade abroad.
The hyperrealists are however pessimistic and do not believe in
transformation, only endless cycles of inter-state threat,
counter-threat, rivalry and conflict, where the risk of war is only
managed by the threat and use of violence. For them the surest way to
peace and stability is the accumulation of military power and the
willingness to use force.

For Bajpai, relations with the USA provide an example of how this works
in practice. All three streams recognise the USA as the only superpower
and of real significance to India, and agree that it is no military
threat to India but that it is a diplomatic threat at times with US
policies affecting India collaterally, particularly in the region.
Nehruvians see the USA as an imperial power that must be contained and
cannot countenance any rivals, and they therefore seek multilateral
answers to the preponderance of US power. On the other hand neoliberals
take the opposite view, stressing how essential the USA is for India's
own development, and believing that the US can be supportive of India's
views and aspirations. Hyperrealists differ from both, arguing that the
only way to build India into a military power of the first rank is to
work with all those who might help, like the USA, but to realise the
limits of that cooperation and its limited utility for India's security.
The elements of Indian strategic culture are evident in what is common
to all three streams, Nehruvians, neoliberals and hyperrealists. The
same elements are also evident in earlier Indian writings on statecraft,
whether in Kautilya, the Mahabharata's Bhishmaparva, or even in
Ashoka's edicts. All regard the international system as anarchic, and
see international relations as fundamentally power relations. In the
practical application of that culture therefore, all three of today's
Indian schools believe that nuclear weapons are essential for India's
security in a world that shows no signs of moving to their abolition and
elimination, and which is inhabited by threats to India's security.
It is this common strategic culture that we inherited, first clearly
expressed and adapted for modern times by Prime Minister Jawaharlal
Nehru, which explains the substantial agreement on values, on goals and
even on means in our foreign policy, despite marked and rapid changes in
the external environment in which we have operated. That is why the
core traits of our foreign policies have persisted since independence,
irrespective of the parties in power. Our goals have stayed constant
even as the means available to us have increased and as the world around
us has become more complex and more linked to our own development.

For instance, our actions in 1971 should have been no surprise to anyone
who had bothered to study our strategic culture. Both our major epics,
the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, are about wars and treat them as
natural and normal, not celebrating them but as necessary instruments of
statecraft, justified when good fights evil. This says something about
war and peace as themes in our strategic culture. We are sometimes asked
how the non-violent land of Gandhi could do what we did in 1971. As
Gandhiji himself said in "The Gita and Satyagraha", "I do believe that
when there is only a choice between cowardice and violence, I would
advise violence. Thus when my eldest son asked what he should have done,
had he been present when I was almost fatally assaulted in 1908,
whether he should have run away and seen me killed or whether he should
have used his physical force which he could have wanted to use, and
defend me, I told him that it was his duty to defend me even by using
violence.. I would rather have India resort to arms in order to defend
her honour than that she should, in a cowardly manner, become or remain a
helpless witness to her dishonour."
In saying so Gandhiji was expressing ideas and a political rationalism
whose roots one can trace back to India's ancient history, to Kautilya
or Ashoka, whichever you prefer.

2. KS' Contributions

It would be clear from this brief description of Indian strategic
culture that KS stood squarely in a long tradition of thought and
attitudes, but applied it creatively to the vastly changed circumstances
of the second half of the twentieth century and the last decade. That
his ideas faced resistance because they were new was natural. But so was
their ultimate acceptance as orthodoxy, since they implicitly were a
development of a long tradition of Indian strategic thought.
Let me try to list some of the more significant contributions that he
made to Indian strategic thinking and culture. Five aspects in
particular struck me as significant and relevant today.

a) "Bomb-mama" and our Nuclear Doctrine:

When KS began speaking of the need for India to build a nuclear weapon
as the most cost effective solution to our unique situation, his was a
lonely voice in India. It took years of steady and unrelenting argument
and persuasion, (and, quite frankly, the actions of the NWS') for his
ideas to be widely accepted. He persuaded us of the idea of nuclear
weapons as political rather than war-fighting weapons. And when we did
conduct nuclear weapon tests in 1998, it was natural that it was to KS
as Chairperson of the NSAB that we turned to articulate the doctrine
that governs the use and control of India's nuclear weapons. (Pakistan,
who tested soon thereafter, has yet to articulate its doctrine, which
says something about the different strategic cultures at play in the
sub-continent.)

It is easy to underestimate the significance of what KS did to teach us
how to think about nuclear weapons in a democracy. The ideas that Indian
nuclear weapons would only be used in retaliation, that they would
remain firmly under civilian control, that deterrence required massive
retaliation and therefore assured survivability creating a second strike
capability, were all first articulated by KS. Today we take them for
granted.
He also maintained the link with our traditional emphasis on
disarmament, making it clear that it was because our security was
threatened and the other NWS' had not responded to our calls for general
and complete nuclear disarmament that we were compelled to weaponise,
and that we remained willing to disarm under legally binding commitments
and timeframes accepted by all the NWS' along with matching commitments
from the NNWS'.

We also owe to KS the very vocabulary that we now use in discussing
India's nuclear weapons programme. When KS began writing in public on
the subject, the vocabulary of nuclear weapons policy was that created
and developed in the context of the nuclear arms race between the US and
the Soviet Union. Its relevance to the Indian, or for that matter the
Chinese, situation has always been limited. (In 2006 Chinese and US arms
control experts realised after decades of talks that they needed a
mutually agreed bilingual glossary to minimise misunderstanding. It took
eighteen months to reach agreement on 1,000 terms relating to nuclear
security. But there was still no consensus on key concepts like "limited
deterrence" and "minimal deterrence" or "deterrence" itself!!) In our
case, we are still in the process of developing our own vocabulary and
concepts, building on the work of the pioneers.

b) Defence and Development:

When KS first began to write on defence issues in the sixties, the
conventional wisdom was that every rupee spent on defence was a rupee
snatched from development or feeding our people. The 'guns vs. butter'
argument was natural in a country where government and individuals were
poor and hunger was rampant. KS was one of the few after Sardar Patel to
argue that economic development needed a sound defence as a
prerequisite. He also went on to argue that the economic spin-offs from
defence spending were not inconsiderable in terms of growth and
technological independence. He had a vision which was rare for that time
of what defence as a sector could mean to the national economy, driving
technological modernisation and growth by providing non-inflationary
consumption. That we have not yet realised that vision in practice,
despite exponential growth in resources available for defence, is not
because his ideas were faulty but because they were never implemented.
This debate on defence and development is one that still continues and
is unsettled to this day.

c) National Security Structures - The Kargil Review Committee and the GOM:
If India was the first parliamentary democracy to attempt to harness the
advantages of a National Security Council system, and has constructed
structures for this purpose in the last ten years, many of the initial
conceptions and ideas can be traced back to KS' writings and those of
his generation. A lifetime worth of thought was compressed into the
Kargil Review Committee's report and many of those recommendations were
later adopted by the GOM.

d) Strategic Autonomy in thought and deed:

The one thread that ran through all of KS' writings was the need to
increase India's real strategic autonomy. By this he never meant cutting
ourselves off from the world. He realised that this would doom us to
eternal technological mediocrity and leave us vulnerable to even minor
threats. Instead he envisaged India working with other countries as
equal partners, as an active participant in the shaping of international
outcomes and, ultimately, the international system itself. For him
non-alignment was a strategy, not an ideology. As a flexible realist he
responded to changes in the international situation facing India: In the
sixties he advocated India reaching out to the US; post-1971 he was a
strong advocate of the Indo-Soviet relationship; after 1991, and
particularly after 2005, he was impatient with our tardiness in grasping
the strategic opportunities that he thought had opened up for India.
This was not mere opportunism. He was a strong nationalist, rejecting US
conditionalities for military assistance after 1962; driving hard
bargains with the USSR as Secretary Defence Production in 1979; and,
resisting policy choices that would have constrained our nuclear options
in the seventies.

e) Values in National Security Strategy; Realism-plus:

What made KS' realism different from the common or garden variety of
Western realism was his ability to combine a strong commitment to the
basic values of the Indian Republic, (of secularism, democracy and
pluralism), with his realist pursuit of national interest. I suppose one
could call this the "realist-plus" approach. He was an advocate of
value based relationships: with the US and others on democracy, with
Russia on secularism, and with Europe on liberalism. He often argued
that there was no real contradiction between the promotion of democracy
and the pursuit of India's interests in our neighbourhood. I remember
heated discussions in the JIC when KS was chair in 1977-78. The example
used by both sides of the argument was Pakistan, where democratic
governments had been well-meaning but ineffective while military regimes
had promised delivery but presided over a basically unsatisfactory
relationship with India. It is an argument that still resonates in India
today. But there was no question where KS stood on this defining issue.

KS argued that the values in the Indian Constitution - secularism,
pluralism, democracy and quasi-federalism -- were imperative to hold
India together in the 20th century. India is alone, along with the USA
in an earlier age, in seeking to industrialise and accumulate power as a
democracy. All the other major nations of the world industrialised and
gathered power before they became democratic. KS felt that this was why
the rise of India, like the 19th century rise of the USS, would not
arouse the concerns, conflicts and reactions that the rise of other
powers throughout history have provoked. For him it was and remains a
matter of India's self interest to help to build a democratic,
pluralistic and secular world order.

To my mind, perhaps the greatest contribution that KS made to
intellectual discourse in India was to bring us back to the Indian
realist tradition, one of the few realist traditions in the world that
has a place of pride for values. KS' writings and work re-taught us how
to think strategically. He taught us that strategy is not just about
outdoing an adversary who is trying to do the same to you. It is also
about finding cooperative solutions and creating outcomes in
non-zero-sum situations, (which are most of our lives), even when others
are motivated by self-interest and not benevolence. Strategy is the art
of creating outcomes that further your national interest and values,
and includes putting yourself in others' shoes so as to predict and
influence what they do.The measure of his success is the extent to which
these ideas are now commonly accepted and no longer strike us as
extreme. Not very long ago, in the living memory of my generation, this
was not so.

3. KS' Concerns Today

What would have concerned KS today? Shortly before he died KS sent me
four papers that he was working on. One was unfinished and the others
were unpolished. The papers were nothing if not ambitious and
magisterial, as one would expect from him. They were on an Indian Grand
Strategy for the first half of the 21st Century, Indian Defence Policy,
Nuclear Deterrent in the Indian Context, and India in the 21st Century. I
do hope the KS Forum and the Subrahmanyam family will see their way to
publishing these papers.
Reading these papers today, when uncertainty in the international system
is at unprecedented levels and as we seem to be entering a new phase of
the world economy, one is struck by how his "realist-plus" perspective
seems best suited to describe what we see around us, and to chart a
course forward. We are in a world where there are few certainties, where
coalitions form around issues and alliances are permeable, where power
is increasingly shared but unevenly among several major powers, and
where conflicts are asymmetric. This is a world with which the Indian
state system was familiar for most of our pre-modern history, a world
where Krishna, Bhishma and Kautilya would all feel equally at home. So
it seems logical that we should return to our strategic culture as made
modern by thinkers like KS to seek answers to the questions we face.

4. Conclusion

If India is to deal with the issues of the new twenty-first century
world, it is essential that we further elaborate our own culture and
tradition of strategic thought. So long as India's situation and needs
are unique, we must encourage our own ways of looking at developments,
and develop our own strategic culture, vocabulary and doctrine. To do so
would be appropriate tribute to KS. Fortunately for us, there is no
isolationist streak in our strategic thought so far, and we have a rich
tradition to draw on. Ironically, the greater our capabilities, the more
we need the world and are integrated into it. So, if anything, the need
for and the rewards of studying our strategic culture will grow with
time.